The Green Party says Facebook shouldn't be the sole arbiter in breaching New Zealanders' free speech rights, Marc Daalder reports
In an occasionally testy select committee hearing on Thursday, Green Party MP Golriz Ghahraman grilled Facebook officials over the company's content moderation policies and failures to protect user data.
Afterwards, she told Newsroom that new legislation was needed to guide Facebook's decision-making process when it decides whether to ban a New Zealand-based account or remove posts by New Zealanders.
"We've got a multinational, multibillion dollar company making decisions about freedom of speech and our democracy, but we don't have any clear guidelines about how they're applying those standards," she said.
"I would like to see legislation that sets out how we treat these online spaces. Because we live in these online spaces, now, and we have all sorts of laws criminalising threatening speech, regulating speech that defames, and somehow we don't treat these online spaces to be accountable in the same way."
Ghahraman also said the decision by Facebook during last year's election to remove the page of the Advance New Zealand party, which was a registered political party fairly and legally competing in New Zealand's election, raised questions around the company's involvement in New Zealand democracy.
This wasn't a call to ban the company from moderating political speech.
"We have seen in overseas examples - and there's the very prominent example of Donald Trump - where there may be a line that can be crossed and democracy can be undermined or threatened by a politician. So, in some cases, maybe [intervention is needed]. But we'd like to know when and how. We don't want to leave it up to this multibillion-dollar corporation to do what it likes."
Ghahraman said Facebook's willingness to accede to stringent hate speech laws in Germany, where any symbol from the Third Reich is banned, showed it would follow New Zealand content moderation guidance as well. However, she also criticised the company for potentially failing to follow New Zealand's data privacy laws.
"We do have laws that saw that you can't deliberately take peoples' information and sell it or allow it to be misused and I think they are flouting that particular law," she said.
This was a continuation of the MP's stoush with Facebook officials Mia Garlick and Nick McDonnell during the select committee appearance.
"Obviously after Cambridge Analytica we made a number of changes... in terms of the data that developers could use and we also audited all of the apps and made a number of changes in that respect," Garlick, the company's regional director of public policy for Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific, said.
She also endorsed the idea of regulation around some of these issues.
"We absolutely hear you on the broader concern of platforms making so many important decisions by themselves and that's why we've been actively calling for regulatory frameworks, in particular in relation to election integrity and political advertising, because we do recognise the broader importance for our society."
Kris Faafoi, the Justice Minister and Minister for Broadcasting and Media, also said he was open to collaborating with the Greens on election-related legislation in particular.
"We've got a cooperation agreement with the Greens to look at electoral laws, so I'm happy to work with them on that," he said.
"I do think that Facebook and other social media platforms probably could do a little bit better in terms of speed of takedown with some of their misinformation - not just in terms of electoral laws. So I kind of agree with that."
